Makeshift

Lucas mentioned a collaborative group today called 'Makeshift', and I read a bit more about them. It's a design collaboration between Tessa Rapaport and Karl Logge who create works that hope to develop sustainable means of living. Rapaport sees that the design community needs to be far more critically engaged and responsive.

Earlier this year, the Makeshift duo created a work at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Art that involved a variety of potted edible plants built into a "make-do garden" city. Nurturing the plants for over four weeks, they created a garden that was more akin toward sprouting plants from cracks in the sidewalk or neighbourhood nature-strips.

"It's our vision of what a city could be ... covered in huge rooftops that get full sun all day, and here we are in this funny little place using lights to grow plants… if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere,” - Rapaport

“[We're using] the space as a place to make things in a responsive fashion rather than working in our studio and importing things from there into the gallery. Instead, the gallery becomes a stage for conversations, response, gives us a chance to try things out,” - Logge

They even got advice from the mother of an artist that was exhibiting upstairs, on how to cultivate their taros plants.

I see this kind of interaction with the people in the space of 4A, and how information is spread by word of mouth etc, to be very similar to the work Lucas and Diego are doing in the garden they are developing at SCA. They are similarly promoting a positive sense of sustainability. A "why not?" sensibility.